B3-CH25 – More About Your Branding, Networking and Promotion

As I mentioned earlier, your brand is your most important asset. You need to use it in all your promotions, both off- and on-site. The subtle impact of your brand, be it on page headers or email footers will gradually imprint itself on the minds of your target audiences through consistent repetition.

So what exactly is your “brand?”

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• Your name and/or your artist’s or band’s name
• Your images – logo, photos, artwork
• Your story
• Your music
• Your videos
• Your articles
• Your slogans and tag-lines
• Your avatars
• Your signatures
• Your contact info
• Your website URL
• Your avatars and icons
• etc

While your brand needs to be “everywhere”, it doesn’t need to be too flashy or too “big” (in terms of design within the media where you use it). Some people like their branding to be subtle, almost unnoticeable, others prefer it to shout from the pages. I’m mostly in that first group, but in truth it’s a very individual thing.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, you need to brand “all” your web properties consistently, but as with everything in life, there are some exceptions. For example social networks where that kind of branding might be seen as a “no-no” or simply too pushy. When you create your profiles on sites like Reddit, Slashdot, Digg or BoingBoing you might even consider creating anonymous or fictitious accounts so as not to appear to be promoting yourself too blatantly. And not that this is a justification or anything but… everybody is doing this. Yes, even the major labels. In fact, especially them. And so does your government and spy agencies!

Note also that you need to be careful abut the website user agreements on some networks. You want to make sure that they don’t usurp ANY rights to your work which you decide to showcase there. And never – EVER – give away even an iota of control over your copyrights. If in doubt, ask a lawyer.

Remember: the purpose of your creating your site and then joining all these different networks, forums, membership sites and so on is PROMOTION.

If you had deeper pockets, you might throw a lot of money on paid ads and hire armies of fake fans to vote you up and create hype around your music. But this is by no means a guarantee of success. Wealthier doesn’t always mean better. Many major labels fail miserably in their promotions, even after they’ve wasted hundreds of thousands on them. This is because most major labels are still stuck in the past and, frankly, do not know how to correctly promote online. The indies beat them regularly. Offline – that’s another matter. But online – you can kick their butts for a TINY FRACTION of their budget, if you know what you’re doing.

In this course the idea is to make you aware of simple guerilla promotion techniques which – if you apply enough of them – can not only put you on the map but also get your very respectable incomes. It requires work and some minor investments, sure. But if you’re focused, you CAN do it very successfully.

So it’s a good idea at this point to refresh our memories of the kind of tools you have at your disposal and how you can leverage them to your advantage in building your artistic career as well as your daily bread-and-butter business.

You have:

• Your brand and all accompanying rights to your image, graphics, copyrights, etc.
• Your website, including all of its intellectual content.
• Your web-wide memberships and presence, where you’re exposed to potentially unlimited numbers of new fans.
• Your (growing) list of members, access to whom will continually and steadily increase in value as your list grows.
• Your music and performances, in and of themselves unique to you and the very reason why your brand continues to grow.
• Multiple income streams, which you generate not merely from music but also from any number of additional programs you decide to introduce on your site. And let’s not forget that you can – if you choose – also give others limited access to your audience. As your site’s popularity continues to grow you’ll find this will be increasingly more attractive to advertisers.
• Organizations, planning and future vision, which set you apart from the millions of other indies who don’t have that and never will – even if their music rocks.
• Knowledge of all existing promotional channels, and awareness of future possibilities. You’re in the thick of it all, and thus head and shoulders above the vast majority of traditional music labels.

When you look at it like this, it’s obvious that you REPRESENT VALUE. Should you ever wish to enter into any kind of a business relationship with a third party – and investor, crowd-funding, music labels – you will be perceived as serious, well-organized and… artistically brilliant to top it all off!

Needless to say, that kind of value is monetizable on many levels. It’s worth to build it, don’t you think?

So now it’s time we look a little closer at the nitty-gritty of what is available to you on the marketing and promotion front.

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Book 3 – Chapter 24Graphic Design	Course Overview	Book 3 – Chapter 26Getting Ready to Promote

Book 3: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, , 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, Overview

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